[Opensource] how to set up a lab of linux boxen

[Daniel Stefyn]

Victor,

I am looking at doing something similar. As our linux labs grow, the need
for automagical administration becomes desirable.

Novell Zenworks currently handles our reimaging but it has had a tendency to
fallover when reimaging linux boxes with different partitions (some
identical hardware has a hidden manufacturer's partition, some has it
removed, depending on when the hardware was serviced). Zenworks does
renaming etc very well but needs looking into to get over this issue. Newer
versions of ghost supposedly handle reimaging with linux but I haven't tried
it to see how the post imaging setup runs.

Looks like you are after some kind of post-install script, ie.
http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/enterprise/RHEL-4-Manual/sysadmin-guide/s1-kickstart2-postinstallconfig.html

If renaming the hostname is all that is needed (the least complicated
scenario), it may be a case of ftp / scp to a server, download pc-name.txt
and running a script to have the pc find it's mac address in the file, grab
the corresponding hostname and rename itself.

if ( hostname == noname) {

Shouldn't be too hard, however, you'd want this to run only once. Also, if
this information could be stored, retrieved

CloneZilla was used from memory by some of the Adventist schools - I will
look into whether they ever tried using it to clone linux boxen as well as
their regular MS machines.

On Mon, Jun 9, 2008 at 3:54 PM, victor rajewski <askvictor at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'm toying with the idea of setting up a lab full of linux boxes. It
> would be really nice to be able to use something like Ghost Solution
> Suite to handle imaging each machine. Has anyone done anything like
> this? GSS _can_ handle linux partitions, but I think it does it on a
> block-by-block basis, and won't change individual files across the
> images, so it can't change the hostname - each imaged machine will
> have the same hostname as the source image (also ssh keys and maybe
> other crypto stuff would need to be changed). There are some apps that
> seem to be able to handle this - FOG, G4L (Ghost for Linux) and
> clonezilla - has anyone used any of these? Does anyone have any other
> solutions to this problem? Is anyone running a lab full of linux
> machines?
>
> vik
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